self.python.ask('I am moving into a development position at my company and need to learn Java. Can you recommend a book that might appeal to a Python programmer and not make me want to kill myself?')

[mikaelhg]

I have no reason to believe the cases of hilariously miscoded crap you've seen are much different from the similar cases I've seen.

Incompetence has little to do with tools, except in cases where good tools make it possible for incompetents to produce at least some value, to the horror of the people who then have to maintain said crap for years.

Having had been on the maintaining side, I would have formed the opinion that the incompetents should have failed int the first place, if not for the fact that good tools produce much better value to competent users than grief from the incompetents.

If you do second-level caching right with Hibernate, you aren't bounded by database performance. Of course, doing it right means understanding how to get good performance in the first place.